


Full Fathom 5,000

by 20thcenturyvole



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Horror, decomposing at the bottom of the sea with your nemesis, dubious understanding of abyssal fauna, whale fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28125957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/pseuds/20thcenturyvole
Summary: Ahab has no heart that beats, no lungs that heave, no eyes that see, and yet he knows himself acutely: the white flesh at his back, the binding cord, the black depths. He is dead, but his soul is not flown, tethered as if by its own line. The whale is a titan bound for Tartarus, and he is dragging Ahab with him to the abyss.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 36
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Full Fathom 5,000

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kutsushita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kutsushita/gifts).



_Drag me to hell, thou wretch!_

The whale dives, the hemp tightens, and in a tumult of foam and blood, Ahab drowns. His is a righteous hate; he is a fury. There is nowhere in him that fear can live - such a cold and fragile thing is burned out of him. He dies as he lived, in blasphemous command of all his will.

Moby Dick, the white whale, his hide as pricked by spears as a Spanish bull’s, thrashes. Manila lines festoon him; Fedallah is lashed to him like a trophy head; Ahab, throttled by his own line, is dragged behind. Ahab is dead - he is aware that he is dead. His vital motion is gone. Yet he sees, still. Unable to turn his head or close his eyes, Ahab looks out into the ocean in Moby Dick’s wake.

The sea above is an airy storm of spume, and in that vortex the ship sinks and the sailors drown. The Pequod is overwhelmed. Out of her split hull roll the precious barrels of spermaceti, each one a hundred-dollar drop weight. Her shattered spars tangle in the rigging; her sails flutter in the roil like a drowned maiden’s skirts. Against their whiteness, the dark bodies of his men drift like schooling fish, small, splay-limbed, each as dead as Ahab. If Ahab’s heart still beat, it would burn at the sight. _Fiend!_ his soul howls. _Wretch, thou hast murdered my men!_ _Thy quarrel was with me, not them!_ Helpless, he beholds their deaths, before a tumult of cloudy red obscures them all.

Red, red! The whale is struck to the lungs! Ahab’s harpoon struck true, and on its last exhale, Moby Dick spews blood instead of water. Great gallons of it, as would fill a sea of their own, colour the ocean like a wash of ink. Above swarm the sharks, but the whale is already too far below to tempt them. His buoyant lungs are punctured, and now instead of floating air they take on water, and sink him down into the deep. Dead Ahab, lashed to the whale’s side, exults that his revenge is complete at last, and that he may see it - but the exultation is brief and hollow. Denied their whale, the sharks swarm the sailors instead, before the light begins to fade. O, horrible, the feasting sharks! At their teeth the drowned men seem almost to live again, limbs lurching as they are pulled to and fro.

Down, down, they sink, into the dark of night, then darker. Ahab has no heart that beats, no lungs that heave, no eyes that see, and yet he knows himself acutely: the white flesh at his back, the binding cord, the black depths. He is dead, but his soul is not flown, tethered as if by its own line. The whale is a titan bound for Tartarus, and he is dragging Ahab with him to the abyss.

No moonless night, no oubliette, no cavern in the deepest earth ever held so complete a blackness as those depths. The dark behind his eyelids would be brighter, could he but close his eyes, and that revelation brings to him a terror that ought to quake his nerveless limbs. He is vindicated: behind all the light of the world lurked this very nothingness, and he had known it all along. No fire can live in this place, and Ahab, worshiper of flame, is helpless, inanimate, yet with every nerve alive to sensation. The weight of water above him could split oak beams. The cold is hideous. The water is in his lungs, his stomach, in his very tissues, swelling his skin.

And still, the whale sinks.

How long does it take to reach the seabed? Hours? Days? They fall, and it is all Ahab knows. He tries to recall the names of his drowned sailors, to bring them all to mind. There was Starbuck, aye, who wanted to deny him this revenge; he tries to recall the warmth of his own fury at that. There was little Pip, mad Pip. His heathen harpooneers, Tashtego, Dagoo, Queequeg; he can bring to mind their faces bathed in fire as they anointed his harpoon with their blood, as he can Perth, the blacksmith. The other men… the other men… What use had he of the names of the other men? What care had Ahab for the hands before the mast, as long as they did their duty? He did not hurt the men by not caring to remember each of them, did he? Strong arms to pull oars did not need the captain’s special attention. His list of names stays incomplete, and very short. He wonders if he should reproach himself, but those sailors remain above him, as he is dragged below.

When they hit the bottom at last, the weight of the water above crushes man and whale both into the sediment. The whale settles, and Ahab beside him, pressed down into that cold bed together, like man and wife forced to the altar. O, for had he not wed himself to this beast when he fixed upon his revenge? Has he not followed him to the ends of the Earth, and into death itself? He has fixed his fortunes upon him, as loyal as Ruth, and now Ahab, his dead eyes fixed upon the infinite blackness, waits bitterly in this new domicile to see if all the demons of hell will descend to be their household.

How cynical he thought himself, yet how he would shudder if he could when he is proved right. How soon they come, the hags, the goblins!

The hags writhe and undulate through the cold, pressing dark; their pale bodies are swathed in veils of slime. They swarm upon the whale, but so too do they ingratiate themselves unto Ahab, eeling about his limbs, their tongueless mouths rasping, blindly seeking his flesh. The goblins come one by one, hideous phantoms in the dark, their snouts like mattocks, their tails like oars. They swim past, turn their foul heads, and then! Their hideous jaws launch from their faces, grasp a mouthful of flesh from the carcass, and swim away with their prize.

How does Ahab perceive their hideous forms, where there is no light to see by? How does he feel their terrible teeth, when he is nerveless? Soon, he has no eyes left to see, and soon, he has no flesh left to feel, and yet see and feel he must. He perceives them because they are hideous to look at, and this is punishment. He feels them because it is a terrible thing to endure, and this is hell.

Time passes measureless, in this eternal night. It never slips by him in preoccupation; he is forced by his own wretched stillness to know each passing moment in full. What must he do - reflect? Pray, by Thunder? Perhaps there is some penance of the mind he is neglecting as he lies upon his silty catafalque. Ahab tries in vain to remember the names of more of his crew, but his rotted, worm-eaten brain will yield nothing more. What of his life ashore - was that anything he wished to return to? He had a wife, did he not? A boy? What were their names? Surely, surely he knew their names. They do not come to him. He cannot even summon their faces. What took him from them? Why did he think so little of returning to them?

He is now no more than a jumble of bones, half-buried in the silt stirred up by undulating bodies and scuttling legs, and how long that took, he does not know. Bristle-worms blossom in the sockets of his eyes. Serpents nest in his ribcage. The snatching claws and gobbling mouths of the denizens below have stripped him of everything - even his satisfaction; even his rage. He has been here so long, without light, or word, or song. He had hoped, in some still-longing part of his soul, that when they were finished with him, his soul might be allowed to depart, but it will not. He lingers, and he knows why: the whale, the hated whale still feeds these devils, and while he remains, so must Ahab.

 _Did I wrong thee, awful behemoth? Did I not deserve to revenge myself upon thee?_ The whale does not answer him. Dumb brute. Ahab once read such passions in him, a living will and a hateful intelligence. They knew one another, Ahab was sure, and hated one another equally. Why then does Moby Dick not gloat at Ahab’s misfortune? Why will he not speak with him now?

Hour by dragging hour, the currents and their squamous, slimy, scuttling denizens carry Ahab’s bones away in pieces to the distant corners of the abyssal plain. In time, the numbers of his visitors dwindle, and then, one day, he receives none. He is bewildered by the yearning he feels for their silent company. When they came to him, they feasted, nested, and mated in him. He was never alone. The whale knew Ahab, and hated him - but to these creatures of chitin and slime, he is only a friend; he is nourishment, unhoped for, sent from a distant realm which they cannot imagine and will never see. They go, and he misses them. They have abandoned him entirely for the skeletal whale, who can feed them still.

Worms grow now from Moby Dick like strange flowers, fluttering in the deep currents as night-breezes ruffle the flowering hills of Bougainville, and in time, they begin to glow. At first, Ahab believes it a trick of his untethered senses, which see without eyes, but behold! In this fathomless dark, this waving reef, its roots burrowed deep in the bones of the whale, begins to emit puffs of phosphorescence - dim at first, then bright as Saint Elmo’s fire. To him who loved flame, who has been these uncounted days without any hint of light, it is dazzling. For the first time, he looks upon the hated whale, and sees beauty.

Did he look like that, when the worms grew on him? Was he ever so lovely to any eye? Perhaps to his devourers, he was as welcome a sight. How he wishes that he was one such worm, moving and glowing, feasting in the dark. Poor Ahab, down here all alone. Poor whale, come to grief in his own kingdom.

He sees a bare patch of bone upon the whale’s skull - a curve of jaw upon which the worms have had their nourishments and left their pits, and he wishes almost that he could know what the worms know. Would the whale speak to him at last, were he to root in its bones as they do? Would he tell Ahab at last why he mutilated him and left him alive, with such hatred in his heart? He feels himself drawing close - the first motion he has felt since the night the whale and he fell upon this sea floor, and excitement stirs him, and a kind of hope. He is untethered now, light as a mote of dust filtering down in the dark. Here is the texture of the whale’s bone: rough and pitted and cold, but welcoming to him. He finds it easy to settle himself in those nooks, spreading his restless spirit over the surface of that great head. Can he make himself a part of this garden of bones? Can he feed these creatures, and be fed in return?

 _O whale_ , he thinks, _why ever did I hate thee? Thou art no more than heaven made thee._

Perhaps this great and ancient bull was not made to be Ahab’s equal, but only made to be himself. For who was Ahab to Moby Dick, before he first gave him chase? No-one. And perhaps he was no-one after, except one foe among many in all the wide ocean, which rolls above them as dark and fathomless as the spaces between stars.

Down beneath that unreachable vault, Ahab settles himself upon the whale, in fungal mats as white as snow. Buried in the silt, they fuse, and sleep.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Kutsushita asked for something that incorporated a whale fall, which I was *delighted* to include, because whale falls are cool as hell. If you're interested, the Smithsonian website features a cool little animated papercraft short film about it: https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/marine-mammals/life-after-whale-whale-falls
> 
> I may have fudged some of the fauna a little bit. For example, I can't find evidence that bone-eating worms phosphoresce, or that other phosphorescent creatures wouldn't have turned up at an earlier stage of decomposition, or that goblin sharks are a more likely visitor to a whale corpse than sleeper sharks - but I hope people with more knowledge of marine biology than I will forgive me for a bit of poetic license in this area. Also, please ignore that Ahab accurately identifies a goblin shark despite them not being taxonomically described until 1898. 
> 
> Anyway, happy holidays, Kutsushita! I hope it serves.
> 
> EDIT: Now reveals are up, I want to credit my flatmate Morbane for the title. The pun was too good to replace.


End file.
